Talend go Apache: Talend, makers of integration, ETL and other data management products, have long been proponents of the GPL license for their products. I’ve asked them about this in the past and they’ve been robust in their reasoning about why the GPL is right for them. It appears though that that era has come to an end with an announcement that the company will be stepping towards more permissive licensing. They first plan to move to LGPL with version 5.4 of their products then to Apache in 2014. They’ve been steadily exposed to permissive licensing as they have built Talend ESB on Apache projects and when they went to release “Talend Open Studio for Big Data” they decided to go with Apache for better compatibility with the Hadoop ecosystem. That product, they say, is “arguably the most adopted product from Talend, ever” and that inspired a licensing rethink. An interesting change (and if you’ve not looked at Talend’s software, check it out… there’s some powerful integration mojo in there).

Mozilla’s new video hire: Xiph.org founder Monty Montgomery is off to Mozilla amicably leaving his current employer, Red Hat, for a chance to work at Mozilla with the other Xiph developers. Current work in progress is the Dalaa video codec which is setting out to be a free to implement and use, and technically superior alternative to h.265 and Google’s VP9. Mozilla is primary sponsor on the project and talking to Gigaom, Montgomery says progress on Dalaa is solid and there could be commercial products using it by the end of 2015. It looks like Mozilla are making sure that they aren’t caught again between a rock (h.264) and a hard place (VP8) in the future.

Oracle and Java fix time: It’s time for Oracle to drop its metric shedload of fixes for October. Short version, there’s a Java 7 update 45 (release notes) now available with security fixes for 51 vulnerabilities nearly all of which are remotely exploitable and with eleven scoring the full 10.0 on CVSS scores and nine scoring 9.3. Typically, most Java holes are around the sandbox, WebStart and applets, but two of the 10.0 critical holes affect servers too. Update your Java 7; if you are still on Java 6, you now have two problems.

VirtualBox 4.3: A new version of Oracle’s open source VirtualBox has arrived. The changes in version 4.3 are sufficient for it to be called a major update. The VT-x code and AMD-V code, the guts of the virtualisation, has been rewritten to fix bugs and improve performance. There’s a new instruction interpreter that can step in when hardware virtualisation isn’t able to handle something. New notifications, better keyboard short cuts and support for video capture have been added to the GUI while support for emulating USB touch devices, webcam passthrough and SCSI CD-ROM emulation have also been added. There is also a new virtual router mode which lets multiple VMs share one NAT service. And obviously, there’s oodles of bug fixes.